James Stover (12/27/2009)
I'll go one further - I don't think it's acceptable to have service packs. It's an acknowledgement that a product is defective. Only after an unspecified number of updates (and years) will it work correctly. The worst part is that we accept and, in fact, expect it. It's irritating that MS isn't giving us SP4 this year. But it's even worse that we should even have to expect one.
Just to throw my 2 cents in, there is no way MS can test all the environments that SQL Server will be put on and to what uses it will be used. As they say, "Nothing is fool proof because fools are so ingenious." As a result, no matter how well they code, someone is going to find some situation that needs a fix.
I play online MMO games. The companies that put them out are always doing patches and improvements. Some of these things shake out during a beta test, most of them don't. One game in particular, years ago, I remember as doing patches of patches of patches before they got it to run properly (and this was after the code apparently went thorugh QA to be released to the client).
The game I currently play patches about every month or so, sometimes more, sometimes less. Not all repercussions of minor code changes are found or caught. I don't mind the patches as each one pretty much improves the overall game. Same thing applies to other software products.
Things change, it's how life is. If the company couldn't change their software to adjust to customer wants and needs, then it wouldn't be worth much in the end, now would it?
-- Kit